分类： business

Two decades after Amazon upended e-commerce by redefining fast shipping with Prime’s two-day delivery, the global retail giant is once again raising the bar for consumer expectations—launching a premium 30-minute or faster delivery service tailored to shoppers’ most urgent needs. Named Amazon Now, the ultrafast offering first rolled out in India in June of last year, and has already expanded to major urban centers across Brazil, Mexico, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States, with aggressive expansion plans underway.

To support the new service, Amazon is rapidly rolling out a network of compact, neighborhood-focused micro-fulfillment hubs roughly the size of a CVS pharmacy, ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 square feet. Unlike Amazon’s sprawling, robot-aided main fulfillment centers that store millions of products, these small hubs are staffed by just a handful of workers and stock only around 3,500 of the most commonly requested urgent items, including over-the-counter medications, fresh produce, beer, diapers, pet food, cellphone accessories, and basic household goods. Amazon leverages artificial intelligence to tailor each hub’s inventory to local consumer shopping patterns, with top-selling U.S. items so far including soap, toothpaste, citrus fruit, toilet plungers and wireless earbuds.

Pricing for the service starts at $3.99 for existing Prime members, who already pay a $139 annual subscription fee, and jumps to $13.99 for non-Prime customers. A $1.99 small-order fee is added to purchases under $15, a surcharge designed to offset logistics costs for low-basket transactions.

In the U.S., Amazon first tested the service in its home base of Seattle and Philadelphia, before rolling it out to Atlanta and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. By the end of the current year, the company plans to launch Amazon Now in dozens more major U.S. cities, including Houston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and Orlando.

Amazon’s transportation head Beryl Tomay explained the logic behind the push in an interview with the Associated Press, noting that faster delivery consistently drives higher spending and keeps the e-commerce giant top-of-mind for consumers. “We know that customers love speed and always have,” Tomay said. “What we see customers doing, when we offer faster speeds, are they purchase more from Amazon. And Amazon becomes more top of mind for that or other types of items as well.”

Yet the push into 30-minute delivery comes alongside growing consumer pushback against hyper-fast shipping, with increasing public concern over both the environmental impact of rushed, fragmented deliveries and the intense workplace pressure placed on order fulfillment and delivery workers.

For Amazon, the new service marks the next incremental step in a decades-long strategy of cutting delivery times to dominate the global e-commerce market. After normalizing two-day delivery in 2005, the company gradually moved to one-day and same-day delivery for Prime members, and launched one-hour and three-hour expedited delivery for hundreds of thousands of products earlier this spring. The 30-minute microhub model is the latest evolution of that vision.

The expansion puts Amazon in direct competition with two sets of established players: on-demand delivery platforms including Instacart, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub, and rival big-box retail giant Walmart. Independent retail analyst Bruce Winder notes that Amazon’s unmatched global supply chain expertise gives it a unique advantage over smaller on-demand platforms, which lack the e-commerce titan’s massive operational scale.

Smaller competitors, however, reject the idea that Amazon poses an existential threat, pointing to their far broader product selection built on partnerships with local merchants and restaurants. “DoorDash has a mission to empower grocers and retailers and augment their existing footprint, not to replace them,” DoorDash spokesperson Ali Musa said in an emailed statement. “We win only when they win, which is how we can offer over half a million grocery and retail items in under an hour across the country.”

Against Walmart, Amazon is fighting head-to-head for the title of the most reliable ultra-fast retail delivery provider. Walmart already offers its Walmart Express Delivery service, which guarantees delivery of more than 100,000 products within one hour for a $10 extra fee; Walmart CEO John Furner told analysts in February that most customers actually receive their orders in under 30 minutes already.

Industry analysts point to a long history of failed 30-minute delivery ventures that Amazon would do well to heed. The most famous cautionary example is Domino’s Pizza, which launched a “30 minutes or it’s free” delivery guarantee in 1984. While the promotion helped the chain grab market share, it led to reckless speeding by delivery drivers, a string of fatal traffic crashes, and costly public lawsuits that forced the company to scrap the guarantee in 1993 after damaging its public reputation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a wave of startups promising 10- to 15-minute grocery delivery from urban microhubs also collapsed, done in by sky-high operating costs, low customer loyalty, and a drying up of venture capital funding before the pandemic ended.

Brad Jashinsky, a retail analyst at IT research firm Gartner, said Domino’s legacy should serve as a warning to Amazon. “You get in trouble when you start overpromising something like that,” he said.

For its part, Amazon says it has learned from past missteps: the company will not offer a hard 30-minute delivery guarantee, instead providing customers with real-time order updates, and says it will not pressure in-hub workers or gig delivery drivers to rush orders. Tomay emphasized, “There’s no rushing either in our building workers or the gig workers.”

Even with those safeguards, analysts question whether the 30-minute model can reach cost-effectiveness. Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Kodali notes that the service only works financially if multiple customers in the same or adjacent apartment complexes place orders around the same time to cut down on delivery routes. What’s more, a growing segment of consumers, particularly Gen Z shoppers, are prioritizing sustainability over speed, and actively choose slower delivery options to reduce carbon emissions and packaging waste. For years, Amazon itself has offered incentives for customers to opt for slower, consolidated shipping, which cuts down on excess packaging and fuel use; supply chain experts note that Gen Z shoppers, unlike millennials who grew up expecting instant delivery, are far more willing to wait for non-urgent purchases.

Still, Amazon reports promising early results from the service: in India, Prime members tripled their use of 30-minute delivery after trying the service, and the offering is attracting growing numbers of repeat American customers. Tomay acknowledges the service is still in its early stages, saying, “It’s in early days and time will tell. I think that it will be interesting to see how it evolves.”

After a weeks-long stretch of record-setting gains that pushed major U.S. benchmarks to all-time highs, Wall Street’s rally came to an abrupt halt on Tuesday, dragged down by a sudden pullback in red-hot artificial intelligence stocks and growing market jitters over spiking oil prices fueled by the ongoing conflict with Iran.

The day’s trading ended with a mixed picture across major indexes. The benchmark S&P 500 pulled back 0.2% from the record high it notched a day earlier, dropping 11.88 points to close at 7,400.96. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average bucked the downward trend, adding 56.09 points, or 0.1%, to finish at 49,760.56. It was the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite that bore the brunt of the selling, sinking 0.7% or 185.92 points to close at 26,088.20, retreating from its own recent all-time peak.

The steepest losses were concentrated among the semiconductor manufacturers and AI-linked equities that have posted explosive gains through 2026, riding the global AI boom to triple-digit year-to-date returns. Intel led the downturn, slumping 6.8% after its share price had already surged more than 200% so far this year. Micron Technology, which entered Tuesday with a nearly 180% gain for 2026, dropped 3.6%, while AI-focused firm CoreWeave fell 6.1%, trimming its year-to-date gain to 60%.

This pullback in AI stocks actually originated in Asian markets earlier in the trading day. South Korea’s Kospi index tumbled 2.3% down from its own all-time high, as investors reacted to fears that the South Korean government could redistribute excess windfall profits earned by domestic AI companies directly to citizens.

A second major headwind weighed on U.S. markets on Tuesday: a sharp new jump in global crude oil prices, driven by growing fears that the ongoing conflict with Iran will become protracted and disrupt global energy supplies. Brent crude, the global benchmark, climbed 3.4% to settle at $107.77 per barrel, up from roughly $70 per barrel before the conflict began. The rally came as a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire grows increasingly tenuous, and the ongoing war has effectively blocked all oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global energy trade, leaving millions of barrels of crude stuck in the Persian Gulf unable to reach customers worldwide.

The rapid run-up in oil prices pushed U.S. inflation higher last month by a larger margin than most economists had projected, according to government data released Tuesday. Even when stripping out volatile gasoline and food costs, core price acceleration outpaced expert forecasts in April, extending a streak of discouraging inflation data. Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management, noted that higher tariffs and unseasonable bad weather have also contributed to upward pressure on consumer prices.

In response to the hotter-than-expected inflation report, Treasury yields moved higher in the bond market after an early period of volatile whipsaw trading. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.45%, up from 4.42% late Monday, and remains well above the 3.97% level it traded at before the Iran conflict began. Rising yields signal that investors now expect the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates higher for longer to bring inflation back under control.

The U.S. central bank has already delayed any planned interest rate cuts in recent months, as it waits to assess how the Iran war and the Trump administration’s new tariffs will impact inflation trends. Lower interest rates can stimulate economic growth, but they also tend to worsen inflationary pressures. Following Tuesday’s inflation data, traders still overwhelmingly expect the Fed to hold interest rates steady through the end of the year, but CME Group data now shows investors see a better than one-in-three chance that the central bank will actually raise rates by December. Higher interest rates typically put downward pressure on stock valuations while also slowing overall economic growth.

Even with rising yields, spiking oil prices, and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty tied to the Iran conflict, the U.S. stock market has remained surprisingly resilient in recent weeks, driven largely by better-than-expected corporate earnings across most sectors. Zebra Technologies was the latest S&P 500 firm to top analyst profit forecasts on Tuesday; the company, which helps businesses digitize and automate workflows through barcode scanners and other technology, saw its stock jump 11.4%, and it also released a full-year profit forecast that beat analyst expectations.

Not all earnings reports were positive, however. Athletic apparel brand Under Armour sank 17% after reporting a larger quarterly loss than analysts had projected. CEO Kevin Plank said the company is moving forward with a plan to “reset the business and restore the discipline required to operate as a best-in-class brand.”

Outside of earnings, dealmaking news also moved individual stocks. Video game retailer GameStop fell 3.5% after e-commerce platform eBay rejected GameStop’s unsolicited buyout offer, calling the bid “neither credible nor attractive.” eBay noted that GameStop had failed to explain how it would finance the acquisition of the much larger firm, and eBay’s own stock rose 2.1% following the announcement. Homebuilder Beazer Homes USA also fell 7.3% after rejecting an unsolicited takeover bid from Dream Finders Homes, saying that the firm repeatedly undervalued Beazer in its offers, with the latest bid coming in lower than previous proposals. Dream Finders’ stock dropped 13.4% following the news.

Global markets broadly followed the downward trend on Tuesday, with most major indexes across Europe and Asia closing lower. Along with South Korea’s 2.3% drop, Germany’s DAX fell 1.6% and France’s CAC 40 lost 0.9%, two of the steepest declines outside of Asia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was a rare outlier, closing 0.5% higher. AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed reporting to this article.

The ongoing conflict between the US, Israel and Iran has triggered an unprecedented crisis in global energy markets, with 100 million barrels of oil disappearing from weekly supplies for every week the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the chief executive of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco revealed Monday.

Addressing analysts during an earnings call, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser described the supply disruption that emerged in the first quarter of the year as the most severe energy shock the global economy has ever encountered. With shipments through the strategic chokepoint blocked, Nasser explained that global markets have been forced to rely on demand rationing to manage the limited available supply.

“Demand rationing will remain in place for as long as supply disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz continue,” Nasser stated. “If regular trade and shipping through the waterway resume, we expect to see a very strong rebound in global oil demand growth.”

The burden of this rationing is not being shared equally across the globe, energy analysts note. Major Asian economies, which rely almost entirely on Gulf oil exports to meet their energy needs, have already implemented formal consumption restrictions. By contrast, while Western nations led by the United States have seen energy prices rise sharply, they have not introduced similar demand-cutting measures.

Oil markets swung sharply upward on Monday, with prices jumping more than 3% after former US President Donald Trump warned that a fragile ceasefire with Iran was “on life support”, as traders priced in a high probability of a resumption of open conflict that would extend the Hormuz blockage.

Nasser joined a growing chorus of energy industry leaders and analysts in pointing out a growing disconnect between oil prices quoted in futures markets and the actual cost of physical crude in the real economy. As of May 11, Brent crude futures for July delivery were trading around $105 per barrel, but end buyers are paying far higher rates for immediate delivery. Last month, HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery reported that spot oil prices in Sri Lanka had surged as high as $286 per barrel, while other industry analysts peg average spot prices for Asian buyers at roughly $150 per barrel.

To cushion the supply shortfall, Nasser said markets have drawn heavily on stored inventories both on land and in floating storage at sea — the only available buffer to offset the blockage. However, he warned that these global stockpiles have already been “materially depleted”, leaving little room for further draws.

Early in the conflict, the International Energy Agency coordinated a coordinated release of 400 million barrels of strategic reserves from its member nations, while China — the world’s second-largest oil consumer after the US — quietly cut its crude imports by 25% from pre-war levels. These two moves helped prevent an even more dramatic price spike in the short term, but Nasser warned against overconfidence in the current market stability, arguing that aggregate global inventory figures do not accurately reflect the extreme tightness in the physical spot market.

Market watchers, including major oil traders, independent analysts and leading US banks, have issued a stark warning that the global energy market will reach a critical tipping point in June if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. JPMorgan’s latest analysis last week projected that if the chokepoint does not reopen by mid-to-late summer, global operational oil inventories will hit a minimum functional floor, triggering even more severe demand rationing that will fall disproportionately on countries outside the United States.

Against this backdrop of global market chaos, Saudi Aramco delivered stronger-than-expected first-quarter financial results, reporting a 26% jump in adjusted net income that beat consensus analyst forecasts. While the kingdom is only exporting 60 to 70 percent of its pre-war crude volume, far higher per-barrel prices have offset the volume drop and lifted profitability.

Unlike neighboring Gulf producers including Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq — all of which are almost completely dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for their oil exports — Saudi Arabia has a workaround: its 5 million barrels per day East-West Pipeline, which moves crude from Gulf fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu for export. Nasser described the pipeline as a “critical lifeline” for the kingdom, confirming it is currently operating at full capacity, and that the company is working to expand its throughput in the coming months. Saudi Arabia also ships 900,000 barrels per day of refined petroleum products out via Red Sea ports.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC’s World Business Report, held just one day before the scheduled Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, former World Bank President David Malpass has laid out a series of bold demands for China, arguing that easing the spiraling global food and fertilizer supply crisis sparked by the ongoing Iran conflict requires Beijing to halt its accumulation of emergency stockpiles.

Malpass, who previously held the post of U.S. Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs during the Trump administration between 2017 and 2019, and led the World Bank from 2019 to 2023, pointed out that China currently holds the world’s largest reserves of both food staples and key fertilizer inputs. “They can stop building their stockpiles,” Malpass stated, pushing for China to release excess supplies to the tight global market.

The call for action comes at a critical juncture for global agricultural production, as countries across the world rush to lock in fertilizer supplies ahead of the upcoming spring planting season. The ongoing conflict has disrupted critical shipping routes, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a major chokepoint for global fertilizer and energy trade — causing severe shipping delays and skyrocketing prices. China, for its part, implemented a full ban on fertilizer exports back in March, framing the policy as a necessary measure to safeguard its own domestic supply security.

Beyond the supply crisis, Malpass also challenged China’s long-standing self-identification as a developing country in multilateral forums such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. He argued that this designation is no longer credible given China’s status as the world’s second-largest national economy. “They present themselves as a developing country when they’re the second biggest economy in the world and in many ways rich,” Malpass said. “And yet they still have the pretence of being a developing country in the WTO and in the World Bank, and they could suspend that,” he added. The BBC has reached out to the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. to request a response to Malpass’s comments, and no statement has been released as of the report.

Turning to the fragile Iran ceasefire, which former U.S. President Trump recently described as being on “massive life support,” Malpass urged the global community to align with the United States to push for a permanent diplomatic resolution to the conflict. He emphasized that the international community cannot tolerate a scenario where a rogue state gains access to plutonium or maintains control over critical global shipping chokepoints. “You can’t have a rogue state with plutonium, and you can’t block the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.

Malpass also expressed hope that Beijing would use its diplomatic influence to help break the deadlock over the Strait of Hormuz, noting that unimpeded maritime trade aligns directly with China’s own economic interests. “China benefits from open waterways worldwide,” he explained. “They run the shipping lines, own the containers, and make huge profit from trade with the rest of the world. So, they would be a big loser if Iran in some way had control of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Ahead of the release of U.S. April inflation data, Malpass also shared his outlook for American consumers, predicting that broad price increases will continue across most product categories. “I expect some up, yes, prices will go up on many products,” he said. Even so, he noted that recently released robust U.S. employment data signals that the overall American economy remains far more resilient than many analysts have predicted.

Global financial markets kicked off the new trading week with divergent performance across Asian equities on Monday, as a sudden breakdown in preliminary Iran peace talks sent crude oil prices soaring and erased some of the bullish momentum carried over from record-breaking closes on Wall Street.

Last Friday, U.S. equity markets notched a series of fresh all-time highs, driven by a stronger-than-forecast U.S. jobs report that eased investor fears about the economic fallout from the ongoing Iran conflict. The benchmark S&P 500 climbed 0.8% to 7,398.93, the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite gained 1.7% to hit a record 26,247.08, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up less than 0.1% to close at 49,609.16. But that bullish momentum failed to translate to unified gains across Asian markets when trading opened Monday.

Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index slipped 0.4% to end the session at 62,486.84, after briefly crossing the 63,300 threshold to hit an intraday record earlier in the day. The steepest drag on the index came from SoftBank Group, Japan’s one of the largest listed tech-focused investment holding, which dropped more than 5% by closing bell. In contrast, South Korea’s Kospi jumped 4.1% to 7,804.71, also notching an intraday all-time high, as chipmaking giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix led broad gains across the country’s technology sector.

Over the past month, both Japanese and South Korean markets have rallied significantly, driven by booming investor interest in artificial intelligence and technology-related assets, with the Nikkei 225 up more than 10% and the Kospi surging over 30% even amid the ongoing Iran conflict. Among other major Asian benchmarks, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index edged down 0.3% to 26,319.93, while mainland China’s Shanghai Composite Index gained 0.9% to 4,219.13, supported by newly released positive economic data: official figures showed China’s factory gate prices rose 2.8% year-on-year in April, the highest annual growth rate since 2022, and weekend export data came in well above analyst expectations. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.6%, Taiwan’s Taiex added 0.9%, and India’s Sensex fell 1.3% to close out Monday’s session.

The sharpest market movement of the day came in global energy markets, after U.S. President Donald Trump took to social media Sunday to reject Iran’s formal response to the latest U.S. proposal for ending the conflict, calling the terms “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”. International benchmark Brent crude jumped 4.2% to trade at $105.57 per barrel on Monday, while U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude rose 4.7% to settle at $99.89 a barrel. Before the Iran war began in late February, Brent traded at roughly $70 per barrel, marking a more than 50% increase amid ongoing geopolitical disruption.

Analysts point to continued disruption to global energy supply chains as a key factor keeping oil prices elevated. The Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil and gas trade, remains largely closed, and the U.S. continues to enforce a sea blockade of major Iranian ports. Most analysts expect oil prices to remain elevated for an extended period as long as the conflict remains unresolved.

Upcoming diplomatic talks could still shift the trajectory of both energy and equity markets, however. President Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week, and the Iran conflict is expected to top the agenda. The U.S. has been pushing Beijing, which maintains close economic ties with Tehran, to leverage its influence to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and move Iran toward a negotiated peace deal.

In a client note published Monday, ING commodities analysts Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey noted that “there remains a glimmer of hope” that the upcoming talks could yield progress on de-escalation. “The hope is that China can use its influence over Iran to push it closer towards a peace deal,” they wrote. “Clearly, this is easier said than done.” The pair added that the global oil market remains “heavily headline-driven” as traders react to every new development in diplomatic efforts.

In currency markets, the U.S. dollar gained slightly against the Japanese yen, climbing to 157.14 yen from 156.61 yen in previous trading. The euro slipped modestly to $1.175, down from $1.1780, as investors shifted toward safe-haven assets amid rising geopolitical uncertainty. U.S. stock futures edged lower in early pre-market trading Monday, pointing to a potential mild pullback from last week’s record closes when U.S. markets open for the week.